Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater I hate Toshiba...

I agree completely Rick! I was just lucky enough, maybe it was planning ahead, but my receiver has 7.1 analog in, so it was just a matter of getting the right Blu-Ray player that could do all of the HD audio decoding and send it to my receiver via analog.

I would really be struggling to justify a new receiver right now if I didn't have the analog option just to get the HD audio. I hear that it is better, but I have a hard time replacing something that I think works great right now so that I have some functionality that I haven't heard first hand and I am not sure, personally, if it is worth the cost to get a "lesser quality" receiver than my current one, but that has the HDMI and decoders.

But one thing that BR will allow is the storage space. So now, more and more mixers will start taking advantage of lossless codecs or PCM. That BR disc was pretty incredible sounding by the way.

For me, BR is more about the picture right now than the sound. Don't get me wrong, they sound great, but the difference in sound between the (well) compressed tracks and uncompressed is much more subtle than the immediate "jump off your screen" difference in picture quality.

I'm probably more sensitive to this than average because I have a big projection screen on which SD-DVDs look quite poor stretched to that size.

I have tried the "smack" it technique, it is important to make sure that the smacking comes from the forearm, not the wrist, or injury may occur.

The smack didn't help at all, but it did relieve me of some frustration I will be adding a bluray player this friday...I just don't know when or where I will get getting it, I am keeping a strict eye on Amazon.com

I think you are right on the money. The audio difference I have seen with HD-DVD pales in comparison to the picture quality improvement over SD-DVD.

Does anyone else think the disc format might be dead for HD content? I think SD_DVD's will be around for a while as picture and sound are very good and everyone has at least a couple around the house. I can't help but think buying movies online and keeping them on a computer will be the wave of the future. That or just stream what you want to your tv from the same type of provider. In that sense, there would be no reason to own the disc.

Greg

Not to mention there are still way more SD TV's out there, which makes owning a high def disc player pointless.People like to own things, streaming could work as long as people can save it for future use for free or the cost to watch a streamed movie is in the dollar per viewing range and the movie can be watched when ever the mood suits the viewer. However, there are still many people that are not computer savvy enough to do streaming from a PC, so this will keep the dvd alive. I think streaming could mean the slow start to BR is going to continue or kill it unless player prices can come down to meet SD dvd player prices prices making it a no brainer as to which type of system to buy the next time, which is what I think Sony is shooting for. I think if BR player prices drop below $100 the BR system will become the next system, at least for awhile, especially if they can convince the music industry to move away from cd to BR as well. I think that is a huge leap, but too few people out there care about SQ and features with their music and are content with 128K downloads.

I think it'll be awhile before BR is overtaken by streaming. The bandwidth required isn't quite there yet to make streaming 1080p a reality for the masses. (you can do it, but it's slow and subject to long buffering times in advance of watching)

It'll definitely get there, but I believe BR will fill the void in the market in the meantime.

Jason